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Duck, You Sucker! Sergio Leone’s belief in friendship
Few directors are as consistent and determined in sticking to the theme of friendship throughout their filmography as Sergio Leone was. The Italian filmmaker behind such classics like The Good, The Bad and The Ugly and Once Upon a Time in America was always – no matter what – a great believer in the power […]
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The real-life tragedy of John Huston’s Misfits
Few movies can reflect and predict – without knowing, of course – the real-life tragedy of the people involved in their making as accurately as John Huston’s off-beat and fatalistic film from 1961, The Misfits, starring Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift, Thelma Ritter and Eli Wallach. Huston’s film is drenched in the tragic fate […]
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Letters from Iwo Jima: How Clint Eastwood deconstructs the enemy
When American Sniper was released in 2014 and went on to become one of the highest grossing movies of all time, many people were quick to dismiss Clint Eastwood’s movie as a needless glorification of American imperialism and gun culture, associating the American icon with jingoistic ideology – when in fact, the film was a […]
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The dog-eat-dog mentality of David Mamet
Long before becoming a deranged FOX News personality, David Mamet was arguably one of the most unique voices of the American stage. His plays defined a certain kind of dog-eat-dog mentality that permeated the rising capitalism of the late 1970s and early 80s, with hits like American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Ross, Speed-the-Plow as well as […]
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The troubled spirituality of Krzysztof Kieślowski
If there is one filmmaker that speaks to me on a spiritual level – who is able to connect with my thoughts, frustrations, passions and speak to my deepest fears and regrets – it is Krzysztof Kieślowski, who with his premature death in 1996 left an insurmountable void in the cinematic landscape. Kieślowski’s movies were […]
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The blue-collar swagger of Bruce Willis
When at his peak, Bruce Willis was the guy we all knew from somewhere busting people’s heads, sarcastically shrugging his shoulders and smoking a billion cigarettes with that trademark grin of his, the one that suggested his characters were mostly losers with a good heart, losers who, if given the chance, would take one last […]
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Mamma Roma: Pasolini’s tribute to motherhood
Few artists were able to stir the crowd the way Pier Paolo Pasolini did. The Italian artist from Bologna – who, when asked what people should label him (poet? filmmaker? novelist? revolutionary?), simply replied ‘writer’ as in the one who was put on this earth to chronicle the lives of others, the less fortunate ones, […]
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Holy Smoke: The power dynamics of Jane Campion
Given the overwhelming success of Jane Campion’s latest movie, The Power of the Dog, which through its world-wide Netflix release managed to find its way into the mainstream and earn 12 Oscar nominations, I decided to look back on what is arguably Campion’s least known work, Holy Smoke; a real oddity in a director’s filmography […]
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Badlands: Deconstructing the myth of America
It’s easy to pinpoint nowadays the moment American cinema began to turn things around in terms of themes and subject matters, when filmmakers let loose their anger and frustration at society as a whole with movies like Bonnie and Clyde and Easy Rider re-inventing the gangster and western genre and adapting it to the times […]
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The Hand of God: Paolo Sorrentino celebrates family, cinema and perseverance
Movies can save you. They certainly saved Paolo Sorrentino, the Oscar-winning Italian filmmaker of The Great Beauty. In his latest film, The Hand of God, Sorrentino confronts his own past, a past tied to the city of Naples, Diego Armando Maradona and cinema. For a director whose movies have often revolved around vast themes such […]
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